Career Path for Group Fitness Instructors
7 Steps to Business Happiness
If you’re a fitness business owner or an independently contracted personal trainer, chances are you’re following your passion and doing what you love: helping others achieve improved health and fitness. Good for you.
But owning your own business can be romanticized. In truth, once you’re out on your own, you’re likely a “one-man band”: the trainer, the admin, the lead customer service tech, the content generator, the accountant and the social media department. Welcome to business ownership.
Teaching Through Sadness
It’s one of those days. It’s bleak and cold outside, and my mom just called to let me know that my dad left on another biweekly, 10-hour bus trip to the cancer clinic for treatment. I am driving to the studio to instruct an early-morning cardio blitz class. My thoughts drift, and I feel a familiar heaviness in my heart. The last thing I want to do right now is teach . . .
5 Self-Care Suggestions for New Fitness Pros and Managers
Based on wisdom gleaned from experience (sometimes the hard way), a few veterans share their thoughts on how new pros can safeguard self-care early on in their careers.
Challenges That Affect Fitness Pros
Like others who pursue helping careers, those of us who are trainers and instructors are professional givers, and the issues that affect this group are unique, varied, and sometimes even detrimental to our own health. lack of self-care has many consequences. This list of the challenges that fitness pros may encounter was derived from our experts’ own experiences.
Possible Adverse Outcomes:
Health Coaching vs. Life Coaching
Coaching is not a new field. “The general consensus is that personal life coaching evolved in the early 1990s out of the coaching techniques being used to motivate business executives in the 1980s,” says Mary Bratcher, wellness coach and co-owner of The Biomechanics Method in San Diego. “The application of life coaching to the health and fitness sector began to happen in the early 2000s.”
Encouraging Instructors to Stay and Play
Many group fitness instructors are independent contractors and teach a variety of classes at various facilities. The majority of them would prefer to offer their teaching talents at a single facility in exchange for regular pay and full benefits, but such opportunities are hard to find.
Networking Know-How
Many experts suggest that networking is a great tool for growing a business. But the process can be awkward or uncomfortable for some fitness pros.
Frank Pucher, CEO of 121 Personal Training in Roseland, New Jersey, offers his top tips on becoming a master networker:
LEAD or Get Out of the Way
When someone asks you what you do for a living, how do you respond? Perhaps you say you’re “a group fitness instructor,” “a yoga instructor” or “a Zumba® instructor.” The correct response is, “I’m a leader.” You do more than simply host amazing classes that help people get fit. It’s time to think bigger about who you are and what you do, if you truly want to Inspire the World to Fitness®.
How to Be a Great Source for Television
A terrific way to increase your exposure and elevate your “expert” status is to be fea- tured on local news media.
However, grabbing a media person’s attention requires savvy and creativity. Lori Corbin, food and fitness reporter for KABC-TV, Los Angeles, offers these insights on how to become an expert source for your local media:
Be unique. Send a
press release that pitches one or maybe two “fresh” topics— something that hasn’t been seen before. For example:
Stale topics: Bikini season and New Year’s resolutions.
“Digital Distractions” Feature Earns Applause
Shirley Archer, JD, MA, has written another high-quality article (“Digital Distractions,” June). The piece had a thoughtful premise; it had a clear research focus; it was well-organized; and it provided stimulating discussion as well as a variety of insights and perspectives.
The Art and Science of Pricing
Pricing your personal training services can be a confusing endeavor. In fact, it may be one of the most difficult issues you face as an entrepreneur. This article demystifies the process by describing three ways to set your fees: market-based, income-objective-based and value-based. Here you’ll learn about the different approaches and explore the pros and cons of each.
The Market-Based Approach
Expand Your Group Exercise Resumé
For group fitness instructors, the future is looking bright! “Employment of fitness trainers and instructors, is expected to grow by 24%” this decade, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Its report goes on to state, “As businesses and insurance organizations continue to recognize the benefits of health and fitness programs for their employees, incentives to join gyms or other fitness facilities will increase the need for workers in these areas.”
Secrets of Getting Published in a Magazine
You have a message, and you want to share it with the world. Publishing an article in a popular magazine is one way to do this. However, simply having a good idea isn’t always enough to achieve success in the highly competitive magazine publishing world. In many cases it comes down to your initial correspondence with an editor. These tips on how to grab an editor’s attention come from Tyler Graham, author of The Happiness Diet and formerly an editor for several publications, including Prevention, Men’s Journal and Details.
Client Confidentiality Is Crucial
As a fitness professional and a business owner, you often develop close working relationships with your clients, and you learn a great deal about their lives, health, medical conditions, goals and fears. Your clients have every right to expect that such information will be kept confidential. It is in your best interests to ensure that it is protected.
Increasing Professionalism: Achieving Balance
This is the final installment in our series on leadership development for fitness professionals. This segment will show you how to prioritize your time so you can work toward balancing your personal life and your professional life. Finding the right work–life balance will reduce stress and improve productivity.
A Better Way to Determine Class Value
Class value is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on where you’ve worked and what you’ve learned over the years, the metrics you use to review, modify or cancel a class can vary significantly.
Physicians Unqualified to Treat Obesity
Perhaps it’s time fitness professionals schooled physicians on how to solve the obesity problem. According to researchers from Johns Hopkins University, a significant percentage of polled primary-care physicians don’t feel qualified and educated enough to treat obesity.
The study, published in BMJ Open (2012; 2: e001871), included Internet survey data from 500 PCPs throughout the United States.
“We evaluated physician perspectives on the following topics:
IDEA Health & Fitness Association IDEA Code of Ethics: Personal Trainers
1. Always be guided by the best interests of the client. a. Remember that a personal trainer’s primary responsibility is to the client’s safety, health and welfare; never compromise this responsibility for your own self-interest, personal advantage or monetary gain. b. Recommend products or services only if they will benefit the client’s health and well-being, not because they will benefit you financially or occupationally. c.
How to Get on TV
As a health professional who made the transition to television reporter, I was asked to host a “Fitness in Media” seminar at the 2011 IDEA World Fitness Convention™ in Los Angeles. I taught fitness pros how to procure a television spot on either a news report or an entertainment show. I then asked participants to submit a one-line pitch using what they’d learned.